“You are paralyzed by the fact that cruelty is often amusing.”

— Douglas Coupland , book Shampoo Planet

Shampoo Planet (1992)

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Douglas Coupland 193

Canadian novelist, short story writer, playwright, and grap… 1961

Yahia Lababidi (1973)

Signposts to Elsewhere (2008)

“If you look into living process closely, you will find cruelty everywhere, for life feeds on life. This is a fact, but it does not make you feel guilty of being alive. (…) From the animal point of view, being killed is not the worst form of dying; surely preferable to sickness and senile decay. The cruelty lies in the motive, not in the fact. Killing hurts the killer, not the killed.”

Nisargadatta Maharaj (1897–1981) Indian guru

Killing
Source: I am That, P.158.

“… happiness does not consist in amusement. In fact, it would be strange if our end were amusement, and if we were to labor and suffer hardships all our life long merely to amuse ourselves…. The happy life is regarded as a life in conformity with virtue. It is a life which involves effort and is not spent in amusement….”

Aristotle (-384–-321 BC) Classical Greek philosopher, student of Plato and founder of Western philosophy

“Life is short and often stingy; feast the heart with what it craves, short of cruelty, and let the world wonder.”

Reynolds Price (1933–2011) American writer

“What me worry? I never do
I'm always amused and amusing you”

St. Vincent (musician) (1982) American singer-songwriter

"What Me Worry?"
Paris Is Burning (2006)

“Dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy.”

Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, and a key figure in Spanish language literature

Statement to the Argentine Society of Letters (c.1946)

“In fact if one person is unkind to an animal it is considered to be cruelty, but where a lot of people are unkind to a lot of animals, especially in the name of commerce, the cruelty is condoned and, once large sums of money are at stake, will be defended to the last by otherwise intelligent people.”

Ruth Harrison (1920–2000) British activist

Animal Machines (1964; rev. ed. Boston: CABI, 2013), ch. IX, p. 175 https://books.google.it/books?id=7_3-ko8zyZYC&pg=PA175.

“If I become so convinced that ‘I’m always right,’ the logical conclusion of that often ends up being great cruelty and great violence.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

Speaking during a discussion at "Kirchentag," a multi-day meeting sponsored by the Protestant church in Germany in Berlin, Germany on May 25, 2017. Source: Dovere, Edward-Isaac (25 May 2017). " Obama in Berlin: 'We can’t hide behind a wall' http://archive.is/PZKE4". Politico. Archived from the original http://www.politico.com/story/2017/05/25/obama-in-berlin-angela-merkel-238806 on 2 June 2017. Retrieved 2 June2017.
2017

“You will find that the truth is often unpopular and the contest between agreeable fancy and disagreeable fact is unequal.”

Adlai Stevenson (1900–1965) mid-20th-century Governor of Illinois and Ambassador to the UN

Commencement address at Michigan State University The New York Times (9 June 1958)
Context: You will find that the truth is often unpopular and the contest between agreeable fancy and disagreeable fact is unequal. For, in the vernacular, we Americans are suckers for good news.

“All the cruelty and torment of which the world is full is in fact merely the necessary result of the totality of the forms under which the will to live is objectified.”

Arthur Schopenhauer book Parerga and Paralipomena

Vol. 2, Ch. 14, § 164
Parerga and Paralipomena (1851), Counsels and Maxims

“You are paralyzed by the fact that cruelty is often amusing.”

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Douglas Coupland 193

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